Phoneme: A basic unit of sound in a language.
Minimal pair: Two words that differ in pronunciation by only one phoneme, and have different meanings.
Example:
* Cat and Bat: The only difference is the initial sound /k/ vs. /b/.
* Ship and Sheep: The only difference is the vowel sound /ɪ/ vs. /iː/.
Minimal pairs are used in linguistics to identify and analyze the phonemes of a language. They can also be used to teach pronunciation to language learners.